China Labour Net
Connexions Directory of Groups & Websites 2018

Purpose: The aim of this website is to facilitate sharing of information, experiences and opinion of the labour movement between China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and the rest of the world. We will regularly upload articles on the workers' movement, political economy, cultural thinking and monitoring of corporations from this region and from other areas. We will also translate some representative articles so that speakers of different languages can receive information about the global workers' movement.

Globalisation has enabled big corporations to spread their production around the world, dividing and ruling workers in those countries. The recent global credit crunch has clearly demonstrated that the historical destiny of workers around the world is now linked together. At the same time, some of the more forward looking sections of the international labour movement have formed cross boundaries cooperation. The economies of the Chinese speaking regions in the East Asia areas with a population of 1.3 billion people are linked together by the same capitalist system. Big corporations from any one of these areas might have investments in all the areas employing large number of workers. Unfortunately, cooperation between the unions in Taiwan and Hong Kong is minimal and exchanges with the international labour movement happen mostly at the leadership but rarely at the grassroots level. China's dictatorial regime has never allowed labour movement to exist. Recently there is an increase in collective labour struggle in China and there are now more individual activists willing to contribute to the movement, but the objective and subjective conditions are still hugely inadequate. There is a need for a platform to enable Chinese speaking labour movement activists to exchange, share and learn from each other, and in particular from the international workers' movement. The lack of basic democratic rights means a permanent website outside China with a vision to include China's labour movement is veryimportant.

On the other hand, China's labour struggles have attracted the attention of labour movement around the world, but there is a serious lack of information and critical analysis. Similarly, rights activists in China also lack an understanding of the labour movement outside China. Our aim is to facilitate exchange through this platform.

Our understanding of the labour movement and workers' rights extends beyond union rights and economic rights, it includes the emancipation of labour. Workers are the majority of the population in any country, labour, like ecology, is the foundation for societal and cultural development. However, capitalism changes the nature of labour and natural resources to be merely a tool to increase capital.